How to improve your new business efforts easily

A short while ago I hosted my second talk for the Agency Collective, a membership club for agency owners where we all support each other in various ways, and I addressed ‘New Business’ as I’ve spent years of my careers being a hybrid new business and marketing professional.

The members who attended the talk all had burning questions about new business issues they were facing and after having a good think about it, I started off the Q&A session listing some common themes and lessons learned from the creative businesses I’ve worked for and with that have easy fixes!

Here’s what I’ve come up with: 

1 – Don’t make your presentations too long, including too much info about your company and too many case studies. Stick to the point – address the brief and the client/ sector specifically, convey how you will uniquely solve their business issue.

2- Do question the brief as soon as it comes in – always challenge it, explore what they mean, ask for ideal budget, stakeholders, ideal duration of projects, it might be a bigger or smaller scope than it first seems and the more information you can gather, the more accurate your response will be.

3- Make sure you plan enough time to respond to the big pitches, skipping over the detail when they ask for a set amount of pages in portrait, and you’ve 200 landscape pages so it will all need editing!

4- Don’t customising every proposal – keep to a template where possible and always try and up-sell other services as ‘Additional’. Sometimes you’ll need to create a bespoke pitch document of course, but there’s should be set standards and pages you use for a simple fee proposal or pitch document that are your ‘key’ pages that lift the heavy loading when you have to submit something.

5- Keep on top of having your latest case studies in a presentation format, or even photographed or the assets ready.

6- Make sure you prioritise your pitches into tiers if you can – are they Gold, Silver or Bronze, how much time do you need to spend on Gold vs Silver, what parts can be delegated and what can be pulled from previous pitches?

7- Do cap resource for New Business – You need an allocated time for your team to work on New Business with you, not always per month but hours per proposal/ pitch when you’ve read the brief. Or if you do decide to set an amount of time per week or month, it may be utilised one week but not the next but having it ‘allowed for’ means that not all your teams time will be booked out on billable work.

We try our upmost to support and consult with our clients on their new business presentation, we write them, edit them, write up game plans – because it’s simply part of marketing. You’re marketing to your new business prospects, sales just means money comes in afterwards!

Do get in touch with us if you need our expertise with your new business pitches or proposals hello@ extmktg.co. uk (remove the spaces!)